Keating
and Mirus’s working paper concerns deaf signers’ use of web-based video communication,
and, in its core sections—which examine the problematic interface of this
technology with ASL expression—we see an ideal research site for contrasting
the “visual” manifestation of ASL to that language’s systemic definition as a distinct semiotic mode requiring the
dynamic coordination of spatial and “facial” signification. This strength
of the research, however, although elaborated at several points, is unfortunately
masked by the overall framing the authors propose, wherein the advent of
video-phoning itself and deaf signers’ “negotiations” concerning it are taken
as the object of analysis. In an age promising “the possibilities of
new types of relationships across time and space” (1), it is understandable
that this new technology might take center stage in an anthropological investigation
of the signing community (particularly as mainstreamed schooling increasingly
segregates deaf children from one another). And yet, what seem to be
centrally at issue here are questions of a different order.

While
language can be studied in relation to social action, as we are reminded
on page 2, the authors’ claim to ling-anth attention need not be founded
upon the facts of discursive negotiation or on “how new knowledge of technologically
mediated environments is shared.” Following Jakobson’s classic discussion
of language multifunctionality (1990:69-79), we see that subjects’ negotiations
over the videoline are examples of “phatic” talk, i.e., talk which thematizes
the channel of communication in the given speech event. Yet, what is
anthropologically compelling about the given data, I suggest, is not the
social fact of subjects’ phatic negotiations (given that general theses on
human adaptability and reliance on talk are not in dispute), but rather the
social fact—the social constitution—of what these phatic negotiations concern,
i.e., the actual articulatory parameters of ASL itself, which the video connection
compromises. What Keating and Mirus have demonstrated is that, by disrupting
the transparency of the shared space between signers, the entire mechanics
of ASL breaks down, and signers resort to “English-like” (“sequence-based”)
expression (10). On page 11, the authors briefly indicate the factors
at issue (“subject-object agreement” in space, “facial grammar,” head tilt,
lip position, eye gaze, speed of articulation); and it strikes me that an
elaboration of this problematic, with further examples sought in the video-phone
data, could well be adopted as the objective of the paper. Forcing
ASL into a novel and constrained medium helps us theorize what ASL is.

There
are no examples of spatially-based “subject-object agreement” (11) shown
in the present paper, and, if I understand the authors’ point correctly,
this a result of the medium. Understanding why this may be so reduces
to understanding the fundamentally social nature of ASL phonology at the
level of propositional signification (i.e., beyond the phonemic inventory
required to describe isolated citation-form signs). When we examine
the way propositions are signified “in space” in ASL (propositions such as
‘John asked Mary’ or ‘John asked me’), we must recognize that the entire
formal apparatus—what Haviland might call signers’ “interactive space” (1996)—is
built upon the straight line defined by signers’ eye contact, and the lateral
(“left/right”) opposition this line yields, which can be diagrammed as follows:

| A |

Sp.1
( )> ----- <( ) Sp.2

| B |

The divisions labeled “A” and “B” function as signifiers for third-person
referents introduced in a given stretch of discourse, and are shared between
signers, corresponding to the same referents no matter which signer employs
them. Thus, the sign “ASK” (bending an upwardly extended index finger
downwards as the hand moves in the direction the palm faces), if directed
from A to B, would signify the event of A’s referent asking B’s referent
something. Similarly, such a sign could be directed between Speaker
1 and Speaker 2, or between any combination of these four “loci.” (Sign
language linguists have modeled such loci as “subjects” and “objects” in
these constructions; hence, the notion of “agreement.”) In the absence
of using referential loci in shared space, signers must, of course, rely
on full noun phrases or fingerspelled English pronouns, signed in English
word-order, consistent with the authors’ analysis.

In terms
of the diagram above, many of the problems video-conversants encounter become
clear. First, at least according to the camera-monitor configuration
that Keating and Mirus describe (where the webcam is perched to the right
of the monitor as we look at it), we see that the cornerstone of the signing
space—the line defined by eye contact—is compromised. This is apparent
in the authors’ discussion of the sign glossed as “YOU” (12), typically formed
by pointing directly forward at one’s interlocutor, i.e., directly beneath
the line defined by eye-contact. Here, if signers point parallel to
their eye-gaze (directed toward the interlocutor’s image), the camera captures
this as either a third-person reference (pointing toward division “A”) or
as a seeming second-person reference to someone off-screen. Signers
attempt to remedy this by pointing directly to the webcam; and yet this too
produces a problematic image, in that the signer’s eye-gaze suggests that
this is either an invocation of division “B” or a peculiar second-person
reference where the signer does not maintain eye-contact. Thus, as
the authors describe, signers sometimes choose both to point and to gaze
at the webcam; but this has the effect of absenting the addressee from the
signer’s view. This, then, radically compromises fluent ASL expression,
which makes frequent use of what sign language linguists regard as “topic-comment”
structures—e.g., “[you know the] BOOK? [I was] FASCINATED [by it]”—wherein
signers rely on minimal signals of recognition from interlocutors in order
for statements to proceed: “[you know the] BOOK? … LAST-WEEK [from-you]BORROW[me]???
… THAT. [I was] FASCINATED [by it].”

As Keating
and Mirus point out, the “facial grammar” involved in signifying a “topic”
(raising the eyebrows, which I transcribe as question marks above) and many
other non-manual signs for a host of other distinctive ASL constructions
are distorted or otherwise imperceptible given poor internet transmission
speeds. But I am suggesting that it may be more than transmission and
resolution problems that are at issue (though, clearly, these are of great
importance). I suggest that the deeper issue may lie in the technology’s
radical interruption of both the signing channel and the signing-space’s
socio-physical parameters as such. Regarding channel, as just illustrated,
addressee feedback is a constituent of well-formed ASL expression internal
even to simple propositions. To mark a “topic” is to form a “sentence”;
but to seek minimal signs of comprehension from one’s interlocutor is indicative
of a fundamentally social mode of signification. Who would raise one’s
eyebrows to a webcam, after all?

But more importantly, regarding the socio-physical parameters of the signing
space itself, if we look to Figures 3 and 4 in the text, we see that the
interlocutor has been isolated in a little square on the monitor, smaller
than the signer’s hand, thus seriously compromising any possible “shared
space” between signers, as ideally represented in the above diagram. One
might say that we have artificially isolated “the ideal speaker/hearer,”
as it were, and, unwittingly, we have found that the ideal speaker/hearer
cannot speak ASL. Keating and Mirus have shown—providing hard empirical
data—that a speaker-centered ideology of language, which has underwritten
the elaboration of sign language linguistics, simply cannot account for even
the phonology of ASL. In the absence of a viable “interactive space,”
the entire diagrammatic edifice of ASL collapses, and a one-dimensional,
syntagmatic mode of semiosis is adopted. What seems to be called for,
on the technological end, is not small representations of both signers on
the screen, but rather one full 30-inch screen representation of the interlocutor,
and a sophisticated webcam (or set of webcams?) positioned centrally and
calibrated three-dimensionally so as to ideally “link” the real space in
front of one signer to the virtual space in front of the other.

Perhaps
Keating and Mirus’s data corpus does contain examples of signers struggling
to exploit ASL spatial signification. (They do cite instances of signers
modifying their indexical gestures so as to better indicate objects in the
space around them (12).) Such examples, supplemented by informant interviews,
would provide an excellent base from which to interrogate the systemic constitution
of ASL. That is, beyond providing a list of processes that the medium
seems unable to accommodate (e.g., “lip position,” “squinting of eyes”),
the authors could elaborate the “overdetermination” of these semiotic forms
within ASL as an integrated semiotic system—i.e., what Hjelmslev might call
the “dependences” (1953) of these forms on one another. Thus, lip position
and squinting (among many other non-manual signals) are fundamental in ASL’s
“topographic” mode of signification (Poizner/Klima/Bellugi 1987, Emmorey
1996), where space is utilized as a mapping resource, such that static and
dynamic relationships between objects (such as cars, planes, buildings, ponds,
fences, people, animals, streets, furniture, etc.) are signified iconically,
with lip position and squinting functioning as supplements to the depiction
of proximal and distal relationships. Thus, it is not simply that the
new medium cannot well accommodate space or small movements of the mouth
and eyes, or quick hand movements, or the affective stances of characters
as they are cinematographically depicted by signers, but rather that these
signifying forms are all cogs and gears of the same integrated system. Compromising
any one of them would seem to pose
serious problems in fluent signed expression.

At the
most general level, I am suggesting that current videophone technology—precisely
because it is problematic for signers—might better be viewed as a choice
research site for investigating the semiotics of ASL, rather than as an object
of study in itself or in relation to signers’ sociocultural response to it. If
there were something particularly unexpected in signers’ negotiations, then
this might be different. But, indeed, while a new force in the signing
community may well be emerging, it is not clear that this is the only, or
even the best, way to conceptualize the videophone as a signing environment. By
focusing on the “newness” of video telephony, the authors are led to treat
modified articulations of signs such as MEXICO, VALENTINE and SON as “new
properties of language” (8). But it seems possible that any similarly
constrained communicative environment might yield comparable modifications
(e.g., when standing far away, or when the signer’s torso is not visible). Thus
it may be more productive to view such modifications not as “new forms” (e.g.,
as in the sign MEXICO, where the hand now moves upward instead of directly
outward from the forehead), but rather as providing insight into the proper,
minimal “phonemic” description of the basic signs at issue. Keating
and Mirus seem, again, to have discovered an ideal research site for the
theorization of ASL form—this time generating sign tokens which can be put
to use in theorizing the distinction between the minimal structure of a sign
and its variable performance.

On the
other hand, it does seem possible to pursue an ethnographic project which
would interrogate the impact of videophone technology on the American deaf
community in macro-sociocultural terms. As the authors indicate (2), the
signing community is, indeed, unique among known linguistic communities,
given that the overwhelming majority of signers come from non-signing households,
where, by and large, they have lived in acute linguistic isolation, often
having little to no language base (in either a spoken or a signed language)
when they first enter school. Such schools, in turn, tend to be mainstream
schools where the student continues to be relatively isolated. I am
therefore curious: Whom are the deaf families in the present sample
calling? When the children in these families substitute phone-chatting
time for TV time (15), are they sometimes chatting with deaf children from
non-deaf households? And, conversely, are deaf children in non-deaf
households video-chatting every chance they get? Considering the uniqueness
of the deaf signing community as an anthropological object, it might make
more sense to investigate the enculturation of “the next generation” of signers
(13) not within deaf households—since this mode of enculturation is relatively
familiar to cultural theorists—but rather as a process of recruitment between
“Deaf” and “non-Deaf” contexts. Deaf adolescents who attend mainstream
schools often do not encounter ASL-signers in any number—i.e., often do not
experience “the deaf community”—until they attend summer camps for the deaf,
out of state. Are the friendships that are made and the ideas that
are encountered in these settings now viable over the internet-mediated (and
hence inexpensive) videophone line? Have subjects been interviewed
concerning the number and kind of acquaintances they maintain now via videophone
versus the number and kind they maintained with TTY-technology only? Or—perhaps
of special concern to linguistic anthropologists—Do TTY conversations differ
from videophone conversations not only in form, but also in content? And,
if so, what systematic relationships obtain to these differences? These
are questions that recommend both examination of videophone data as well
as ethnographic involvement.

Lastly,
while I have suggested other possible orientations to the data here, it is
worth pointing out that Keating and Mirus’s orientation in terms of subjects’
human achievement (15) and adaptability to new circumstances of their environment
(13) makes sense within the context of Deaf Studies literature more generally,
which has approached the culture of deaf signers largely in universalistic
or humanistic terms. “Deaf culture,” Padden and Humphries conclude
in their seminal study, “is a powerful testimony to both the profound needs
and the profound possibilities of human beings” (1988:121)—a position these
authors ground with reference to the preceding two decades of research on
ASL as the “natural language” of the deaf, i.e., as specifically amenable
to the Universal Grammar thesis. Similarly, Rutherford contends that
her examination of deaf folklore “provides us with a clear illustration of
the nature of culture as a mechanism by which a people adapt to their environment”
(1993:141), and concludes that the community’s folklore “serves American
Deaf people the same as any folk group’s traditions do” (ibid). This
tendency to conceptualize deaf culture as “human culture,” and moreover as
“the same as any other human culture”—a necessary argument in the birth of
Deaf Studies—perhaps contributes to the present study’s focus, as well as
to its foregrounding of multigenerational deaf families. I have tried
to indicate here, however, that it is rather the exceptional nature of both
ASL and deaf sociocultural reproduction that might have a greater claim to
scholarly attention, as it is these which show the limits of current models
rather than their strengths.

Hjelmslev, Louis. 1953 (1943). Prolegomena to a theory of language. Supplement
to International journal of American linguistics, Vol.
19, No. 1. (Trans.) Francis J. Whitfield. Indiana University Publications
in Anthropology and Linguistics: Memoir 7 of the International Journal of
American Linguistics. Waverly Press, Inc. Baltimore.

Jakobson, Roman. 1990 (1960). The speech event and the functions of
language. IN On language. Harvard
University Press. Cambridge.